As Bill Maher draws closer to me in his political views, disdaining the excesses of “progressives” (a word that should always be om quotes), he accrues more criticism. Too bad: the Democrats are going to keep losing so long as they embrace crazy positions that make average Americans shake their heads.
This segment from last Friday is called “New Rule: I Told Ya So.” What he told us that Republicans are whittling away at Democratic votes from small groups, while “Democrats offer high-minded intangibles” that don’t affect our daily lives. Maher runs through a litany of niches from which Trump drew votes, bit by bit. (There’s a smidgen of anti-vax rhetoric.) And it doesn’t matter that stuff Trump is proposing now is stuff he denigrated in 2020. Other campaign promises, like building ten “freedom cities” with flying cars were ridiculous, but it doesn’t matter.
Like me, Maher is a Democrat who wants the party to win (but with good principles), and offers suggestions to that end. One involves realizing what Americans see as “pains in the ass,” and the other is to find decent leadership (i.e., not Kamala Harris). What angers Maher most is that Trump is talking about legalizing pot, which really hits home because Maher is a stoner of sorts.
Make no mistake about it: Maher is no fan of Trump. But he’s analyzing here why Trump appeals to so many Americans, but doing that in the cause of liberalism. It’s sad that Maher is being attacked by “progressives” for saying stuff like this.
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[ GIF of Orson Welles clapping in Citizen Kane ]
… OK, I can’t help adding a note about this thought I’ve had – about leaders. I make no argument here, I only think it is e.g. food for thought. And I know PCC(E) made his understandable point a number of times on needing leadership.
The constitution contains zero instances of the word “leader”. I wonder if this is a key to understand something here – that perhaps no leaders is better – or is what “the people” means, meaning “the people” is the single “leader”.
I don’t know. Just brainstorming. Leadership is an enormous topic.
The ‘they are coming to murder you and rape your women and eat your dogs’ guy won 45% of the Latino vote, or LatinX vote as AOC would remind us. Guessing over 50% of Latino males voted for Trump. 35% of Asians voted Trump.
Remember all the talk about how the Presidential race would go permanently Democrat because Texas would be a blue state by the end of the 2030’s? Say goodbye to that. Keep it up Democrats, by the end of the 2030’s Latino’s will be voting 60% Republican and Texas will be forever red.
But hey, when Carville tells you to talk normal and act normal, do laugh at him and call him an idiot.
Good points.
Also, I found yesterday, excellent how Bill mutilates this NYTimes fool on “Pawesthtine”.
I can’t remember his name now but I endured too many years of his woke, semi Christian, Islam apologist crap in the Times.
D.A
NYC
Nicholas Kristof, IIRC.
I understand that you are from Iran (am I wrong?). Iran has produced one of the most beautiful movies of all-time. I am referring to “The Color of Paradise”. Note that the movie is completely apolitical. The movie is set in northern Iran. When I think of Iran, I think of the Zagros mountains (too much Geology). To me Iran is very mountainous and very dry. The movie shows the other side of Iran. The Iran shown is very lush.
Too many progressives live apart from the daily experience of most people. Many of us on the “moderate left” do as well.
For instance, how many people do you know that don’t have a university degree? I’d say maybe 5% of the people I call friends/acquaintances don’t have one.
But actual the percentage of Americans with a degree is less than 40%…the majority don’t have one.
You could go down the line. How many people do you know personally that have been in jail? How many people do you know that smoke cigarettes regularly? How many people do you know that own a gun? For me, the answers to these questions are “almost none”. But that just makes me weird, as these are all rather commonplace in the US.
You may find that you and your personal circle are drastically outside the norm of many Americans.
When it comes to domestic policy, I see at least three things that are considered progressive, and I don’t see why Jerry or any Democrat would have a problem with them: higher taxes on the rich (can we go back to Eisenhower levels?), ramping up green energy solutions as fast as possible, and instituting some kind of single payer health insurance program. In other words, I’m with Robert Reich.
I’m sure some “centrist” Democrats and some conservative Democrats (basically the same as the “centrists”) are on board with these three, so why not use the progressive label? And if you’re a Democrat who doesn’t embrace these three initiatives, well, you’re basically a Republican.
I’ll always maintain my progressive views on these three issues and will never use scare quotes around the p-word.
In the Eisenhower era in the United States, high taxes were applied only on high wage and salary income. Truly wealthy people arranged to be paid in stock dividends or capital gains from their business investments, exactly in order to avoid the high marginal tax rate on straight salary. Even today, tax rates on dividends and capital gains are lower than salary at comparable levels. Reducing the confiscatory marginal rates (70-90%) on salary allowed the expanding and well-paid managerial middle class, who mostly do earn their income as straight salary, to enjoy broadly lower taxation. Otherwise a promotion at work wouldn’t have been worth the squeeze. Lower taxes are always popular if you’re the one payin’ ‘em.
As for universal single-payer medical care, I think that idea has run its course given the current age distribution and dependency ratio, unless you are prepared for both stringent rationing and aggressive price controls. As the adage goes, you think health care is expensive now? Wait till it’s free. I don’t doubt that a lot of Americans favour the idea. Who wouldn’t like to have their bills paid by Someone Else? What they’ll find is that only those who pay no taxes will be able to afford it.
Green energy solutions seem like an easy win, if only there were any that will keep the lights and A/C on, and our personal transportation available, at acceptable cost. Since you offer it as a progressive policy, you seem to be admitting that these solutions will cost tax subsidies, compulsion, and imposed shortages. (If they didn’t require subsidies, the private sector would be providing “cheaper and better” through market mechanisms already.)
Green energy is the one progressive policy on your list that I doubt has any actual support among centrist voters, even the ones who do think about about global warming occasionally as a soluble problem. The number of people who right now reduce their own CO2 emissions by driving at the speed limit or who take transit to work when the car is much more convenient should give you a good handle on that degree of personal commitment: close to zero. The progressive individual can’t do anything about taxation or health care funding until the necessary legislation gets passed, but he can start right now making a difference in his own fossil-fuel consumption habits. Why doesn’t he? With most progressive policies such as rent control and free medical care, the costs are promised to be shifted onto the fat cats of society; the activists need make no personal sacrifices. With green energy, the progressives bear the costs themselves. Oh, their activists say “the corporations” will pay, but we all know we will as their customers, and again as taxpayers. If there is a power shortage on a hot windless night, the progs will get told along with everyone else, through “demand management” and load shedding, that they can’t run their A/C or charge their cars.
But let’s put that to the test. Let the Democrats, or progressive parties anywhere, campaign on all three and see how far it gets them.
Italics out of control
Regarding single-payer medical care, or rather our ‘system’ in the U.S., it’s good to be reminded occasionally that no country in the world proposes to base its healthcare financing system on that of the U.S. My impression from my healthcare economist colleagues is not that a single-payer system would be unaffordable — it is that the barriers to converting are essentially insurmountable under any foreseeable political future. So we keep ourselves mired in a kind of sunk cost fallacy.
Indeed. Many countries have what is somewhat confusingly called the single-payer system or finance healthcare just out of taxes, just like socialized roads, military, schools, and national parks. It is well documented that the cost per person of health care in the USA is the highest in the world, but several countries offer better health care by any sensible metric.
Electric vehicles: Buy them new, don’t buy them second hand. Cuz the new battery u will need to buy at some point cuz poorer people tend to drive used vehicles to the end, will be about 10X more than the worth of the vehicle. Poorer people need not apply. They will go in droves to the party who will say screw the ev mandates, the Republicans. Besides, most people have no access to garage chargers, they park on the street. Go green is ivory tower isolationism, which the Democratic party is drowning in. In BC, Canada, the federal Liberal party dumped Trudeau’s federal carbon tax, the NDP gov’ gov’t in BC dumped it, and I can guarantee you that well before the next BC election they will dump their crazy EV mandates. 100% ev’s by 2035. LOL! Ivory tower cluelessness.
Remember Mockingbird Games? Clue: the grimy working class coal miners (what was Pennsylvania) were Republicans. The effete, clueless elite with the goofy costumes and hairdo’s and affectations, literally living in ivory towers, those were Democrats. But do completely screw the poor over with ev mandates. (and if you say well we have yet another multi-billion progran for poor people and ev’s, I mean, lol!)
There has been an inversion in politics since 1980, Ronald Regan in denims and cowboy hat and the only thing more leathery than his saddle on the horse he was riding was his face. As opposed to the laughable Snoopy in a Tank (dukakis, circa 1988). LOL!
Wanna know why Democrats are tanking? Duhh! Clueless effete snobs infesting the party are the reason.
As far as green energy, my electric bill for a 4000 square foot house with swimming pool and an EV was $16 dollars.
As far as healthcare, there are already stringent price and access controls. Medicare is the most efficient payor. Currently, 40% of the healthcare dollar goes to administrative waste on part of insurance companies which the providers have to deal with. Medicare for all is the most efficient system.
The trite “wait till it’s free” comment demonstrates a lack of wanting to understand the single payer model. It’s about comprehensive care for everyone with progressive financing. That makes it affordable for each of us.
I bought electric yard tools. I got covid shots. I do not eat beef anymore.
Is that due solely to progressive views?
How do I know if it will cause progress?
If it will cause progress, where is it progressing to?
What specifically is progressing?
What knock-on effects could be significant?
On the other hand, the p-word was adopted and shouted at full volume by activists of the P Party of 1948—prepared to risk handing the election to the GOP because the Truman administration had not smothered Stalin’s gulag state with love and kisses. Something of this manner is evident again in our contemporary P-ives.
Agreed, Jeff. It doesn’t take very long in the United States to make acquaintance by name with violent felons, families of the murdered, drug addicts, thieves, and the homeless. It’s even easier to meet and get to know welfare recipients, young teen parents, high school dropouts, and people struggling to pay their modest monthly bills. Add in those who are charismatic or fundamentalist religious believers and those who have a job rather than a profession and we are talking about most of the country. Knowing these people as individuals rather than as abstract groups won’t necessarily make one wiser, but it does heighten awareness of how much caricature, callousness, and misunderstanding circulate among both the highly-educated left and the right despite the ostensible desire and oftentimes misguided policies to help “those who are less fortunate.”
It’s not that there is a stark disconnect between the college-educated and everyone else, particularly as the former has become somewhat pedestrian. It is much of the elite-educated, globe-trotting class from which we draw many institutional leaders that is increasingly blind to and dismissive of the values and lives of their fellow citizens. Oh, many of them care—provided that others sit down, shut up, defer to their betters in matters of governance and policy, and don’t “vote against their interests.” After all, it is the rabble that threatens “our democracy.”
Oh absolutely Jeff. Not just the hard core “low mate value” crazy campus girls, but class wise I for one am quite bubbled. Most of my friends and many neighbors have advanced degrees.
hahah. The smoking question is very true. Although I smoked for 35 years a decade ago I swapped for vapes (love me my nicotine!) but the only people I know who smoke are a few “neighborhood friends” and the local homeless.
No guns (NYC but even non-NYers I know) and no jail (unless you count my former clients – hehehe- defense atty).
Charles Murray’s “Coming Apart” is an excellent study in this phenom.
It is quite understandable, we tend to “sort” ourselves, homophily. But I’d also argue in these times (as opposed to our youth) via social media (me on X) we can get a better idea of the other side and other classes. I do that quite a lot myself, even subjecting myself to PBS each night in a ritual of self torture. 🙂
cheers Jeff,
D.A.
NYC
Love this response!
Interesting reference to the boogie-man Charles Murray. I don’t agree with his most infamous work (yes I have read it and do agree that a lot of the criticism of The Bell Curve is inaccurate), but will check out “Coming Apart”. I did listen to him when Sam Harris had him on and he did not come across as the rabid racist many paint him as.
Some years ago I attended a talk by Murray at an international conference in Brazil. The venue was packed out – I guess lots of people wanted to hear this so-called “racist” in person. His talk had nothing to do with race but was instead a series of arguments for a UBI.
His call for a UBI fits very well with his overall view that a) people vary in their intelligence, and there are significant numbers of people with low intelligence as measured by an IQ test (appx 16% of the population have IQs under 85), and b) intelligence matters in the modern economy.
So he believes that a non-trivial number of people, due to intellectual limitations, will struggle mightily to be gainfully employed in the modern era and will require some type of assistance.
It’s a humane response to the problem as he sees it. I don’t necessarily disagree with either premise…people like me in the middle of the bell curve struggle…I can only imagine the struggles of someone one std. dev. below the median.
Folks who are in the right tail of the intellectual bell curve don’t know how good they have it.
I’ll see that PBS (News Hour) and raise you Al Jazeera, where I regularly watch Inside Story. I do skip over items at the first casual mention of Israeli “genocide”. They do have non-Israel topics, and very occasionally even one of the panel on an Israel topic is worthwhile. YMMV greatly.
Interesting question
Bearing in mind, I am retired and live in a semi-rural part of British Columbia.
My neighbours generally don’t have post-secondary academic qualifications. My ex-colleagues were technical, with diplomas or higher. Generally, my friends don’t smoke. My neighbours seem to own guns. One claimed he had thirty, but has donated some to his grandchildren. The odd neighbour has spent a night in jail.
While interesting, I am not sure where I am going with this. This is all a bit removed from my formative years.
In 1977, Harvey Milk was the first openly gay man to be elected in California. He won over the average voter who might have voted against him by proposing a “Scoop the Poop Law,” a novel and incredibly appealing idea to the San Francisco folk who were sick of dodging and scraping what dog owners left behind. He was a Democrat.
Find a small but culturally significant issue.
Ah, the good ol’ days in California, when dog poop was the problem.
I’m sorry, but LOL
Re the rest of the show, I was thoroughly unimpressed by the “Stanford Scientist” guest, who (e.g.) distinctly pronounced those capitalisations. If it quacks like a quack….